If they have a spare moment, Welsh MPs may like to ask Rishi Sunak whether he sees Britain’s unwritten constitution as endlessly obliging when it comes to bypassing voters in his selection of members of the cabinet.
I make the suggestion only because I think it would be fascinating if the prime minister told us how - or more likely if - he attempts to justify appointing as foreign secretary a member of the public who is not an MP and whose suitability to hold one of the great offices of state has in any case not been even remotely the subject of public discussion or assessment.
At the same time, I’m assuming we’d all like to know how - or more likely if - Sunak may try to justify David Cameron’s appointment via the staggeringly disreputable route of the overnight invention of a peerage, while presumably at the same time hoping to curry favour with voters in the run-up to the general election by bringing on board a leading enabler of Brexit.
In this last, the prime minister will prove himself an inept strategist. Does he really think people will have have forgotten about Cameron’s capitulation to the rabble-rousing anti-Europe hysteria orchestrated by Nigel Farage and the consequent referendum he never wanted and went on to lose, to Britain’s huge economic disadvantage?
Equally, he surely can’t believe memories are so short that everyone will have forgotten that the austerity programme introduced in 2010 by Cameron and George Osborne, following the 2008 financial crisis, not only targeted the poor and disadvantaged but probably prolonged the recession. (Historical note: 75,000 disabled people had their Motability cars taken away because of tightened benefit eligibility.)
Following’s Cameron’s precipitate elevation, one question now is whether, emboldened by his bypassing of the electorate, Sunak will perhaps be considering pushing the boat out and having a complete cabinet clear-out, replacing present incumbents with, amongst others, a couple of farmer neighbours in his north Yorkshire constituency, the chap who did such a fine job reroofing his country house and the landlord of the Dog and Duck in Pickering.
Is he sensing endless scope for constitutional extension and renewal, together with a gratifyingly enormous saving in time and energy compared with the present slow, tiresomely circuitous and often controversial process of constituency-focused candidate-selection?
Appointments to cabinet, Sunak may well be concluding, are too important to be left to decisions involving the great unwashed.
In any case, he may reason, the Commons’ present cramped seating arrangements could at any moment become a matter of investigation by the Health and Safety Executive if numbers aren’t thinned out, while it’s obvious from television coverage of the Lords that there’s acres of room left on the red benches.